Balaji Narasimhan the writer feels the Slumdog hype has overshadowed Pinki Sonkar the true Indian Oscar feat
Balaji Narasimhan the writer feels the Slumdog hype has overshadowed Pinki Sonkaru00a0the true Indian Oscar feat
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The lesser known heroine: Everyone is talking about how great a movie Slumdog Millionaire is. Very few are mentioning Pinki Sonkar, the true heroine of the Oscars from the Indian perspective |
And had Slumdog Millionaire not won any award, I'm sure all of us would have hailed the success of Smile Pinki.
But this was not to be, and a film truly deserving of coverage got the short end of the stick.
This is not to say that I'm criticising foreigners. There have been many who have tried to genuinely study India and understand its myriad intricacies. Two names come to mindu00a0Paul William Roberts, whose book Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India offers a nice view of both the grandeur and the decadence of India across the 70s and the 90s, and The Greatness of Saturn: A Therapeutic Myth by Robert E Svoboda.
The reason why these books are interesting, nay, inspiring, is because the authors have tried hard to understand the country that is India.
For instance, Svoboda is conversant in various Indian languages like Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Sanskrit, while Roberts has studied Sanskrit at the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi. And their knowledge of India is reflected in their works.
For example, when Svoboda describes the scene when Saturn approaches Vikramaditya, you can almost see it unravelling in front of your eyes.
And when Roberts writes about India, he writes about diverse people like a penniless ex-prince as well
as religious men like Satya Sai Baba and Ramana Maharshi. The squalor of India comes across, but so does the serenity because such people, unlike Boyle, are immersed in India. As is Pinki.
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